if you don’t have anything nice to say

move to los angeles.

it must be her voice saying that,
i could watch her mind at work
like a crippled rube goldberg machine
built entirely out of bowls of goldfish
and hammers

if i recall

on the rooftop
the sky was a mottled sheet
of rough-grade sand paper
made with pieces of what looked like everything
as it scraped down against the steeples
rounding off the scissored tips before
poking clear through to the other side,
and unwieldy things began to tumble out of it,
oven-shaped and leaky wheelbarrows
of condensed thoughts and clouds
caught up in the tangled blankets, splashing
down into the tolerant, surrounding waters
and every window was a small television
into different people’s lives, people
slouching inward, watching smaller televisions
broadcast news of weather systems shrugging
like pale rocks sulking just below
the clear ceiling of the tide.

Roswell!

Invasion & Abduction in Small Town America

Last week, I came to a startling conclusion. I was perched in the passenger seat of a sleek, speeding black automobile, destined for Roswell, New Mexico when the entire nation flashed before my eyes. The past six months alone have found me a passenger in cars crossing twelve thousand miles of hot American landscapes, midnight superhighways, and twenty-one welcome signs of unfamiliar states of the union. Being a reluctant driver and ex-island inmate, the stats are outrageous, for they accentuate what appears to be the height of my fixation with the role of “passenger.” What can it mean that I haven’t owned a car for six years, have driven less than five hundred miles since, and yet am indirectly responsible for rolling through roughly thirty thousand odometer clicks of naked desert, buggy bayous, and miles of malls? It suggests a love for leather, conditioned air, and deep-fried dinner. It hints at an inexplicable gratification from speeding into the unknown, heavy investments in Conoco, Valero, and Unocal. Impermanence. Transit. Dynamics.

As an early twentysomething, I have spent a decent chunk of unemployed “loiter” time in the comfort of plush upholstery. An undergraduate in the age of pneumatic swivel chairs, and victim to the great digital abduction of a generation into cyberspace. One thousand and one ways to spend a year seated. But my affinity for land travel has sprouted like ambitious wisdom teeth, tucked away in the recesses of my head. An urgency that boils when I imagine myself working “with paper” along the river Temps, an ever-growing concern with the arrival of our graduation. The meaningless voyages from Pacific to Atlantic coasts and every desert in between have served as evasive maneuvers, epic distractions and senseless burns through the land and night in the name of youth and coffee and fear. But they have also sired a sense of our nation as a contiguous whole, one terribly long road, an American spectrum, if you will.

Images and archetypes of small-town America are as diverse as the assortments of memorabilia bearing our illustrious stars and stripes on shelves at your nearest Walmart. The “Walmart Problem” is perhaps the most American dilemma to define our nation that I’ve witnessed from the sock-smudged passenger window seat. A question of freedom, ethics, the infamous moniker of “moral values” and a chain that has divided and conquered small town USA with 3,389 stores across the fruited plain. This says nothing of the 2,688 Walmarts now established internationally in swelling nations such as China, where 90 percent of the products are created. Sometimes it’s difficult to imagine the “old glory” headbands and beach towels being processed in Zhanjiang, and not sewn by wrinkly white grandmother fingers in Tuscaloosa.

Forgive my magnetism toward the subject of the greatest retailer in history in an essay allegedly regarding travel and the dynamics of small town America, but the collision is inevitable. Cities of ten thousand and less are home to multiple Walmarts, where the growth of our last decade has executed small businesses with Napoleonic leverage. In the wake, we are left with graveyard malls, orphaned stores, and a brand new flavor of mulishness and allegiance to the god of lowest prices. There are towns named after single buildings, for post offices and french fry slums. There’s good ol’ Dish, Texas, named solely for its free satellite television provider.

In all honesty, one cannot claim to have “seen” or far worse “done” the country from the humming tunnel vision of interstate freeways. Real towns truly exist miles from the artery, from the mammoth signs projecting names of better known cities with movie theaters and runways. I won’t avow to have “experienced” most small towns in my travels, for I have always moved on when I became fearful, or finished urinating. However, I actively pursued Roswell, New Mexico, in hopes of unlocking the secrets of a classic American fable, exploring the aftermath of a dated claim-to-fame, and in response to a barf-green flyer advertising the annual “Roswell UFO Festival” during the first weekend of July.

Upon arrival into Roswell, following hundreds of miles of desert regardless of your approach, you run a familiar gauntlet of mega-chain grease eateries for miles before hitting Main St. Sure enough, Walmart is the first definitive, decorated establishment in Roswell, featuring smiling, verdant martians welcoming both “earthlings and aliens” to the air-conditioned epicenter. And like so many other Walmarts in the middle of nowhere, the parking lot is inexplicably full. Our New Mexican hosts brought us to Walmart not only to run errands and buy groceries, but also for the simple fact that people gravitate toward it, whether or not they have anything to do at all. Teenagers park their glossy pickups in the grey ocean of a lot, lounging around in their truckbeds, some with pitbulls moaning on chains. They receive phone calls and beckon others to join them. The new American tailgater needs not a football game. The new American hangout needs not a Playplace with plastic ball pits, purple mascots, or happy meals. No, people are inexplicably flocking as the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson once famously predicted.

The sensation of entering a Walmart is undisputed phenomena. It is the same in Roswell as it is in Boston as it is in Chihuahua. Perhaps this only inflates its appeal. There is no hint of the outside world, no windows, no triple-digit desert, and certainly no eminent danger. Not since casino-hopping in Las Vegas have I known such disorientation, navigating through sterile pottery isles and warehouses of prepackaged noodles. But the more time I spent in Roswell’s Walmart, the more I began to see in the corners of my blazing contact lenses. I honestly believe to have witnessed a baby girl take her very first steps. Family members circled in on her, crowing out proudly and lifting her by the teeniest hands in celebration. This would always be the place she did it, I thought. I will always have been standing five feet away, contemplating stealing a pair of dumb sunglasses. Why was I here? What exactly was happening around me?

This report is already a failure, for a number of reasons. I would like to say that Roswell’s extraterrestrial tales are stunning, that upon finally entering the UFO museum I was stunned by brimming evidence that tainted my entire perspective on life beyond the great marble. (After all, I couldn’t sleep for two nights after watching “Signs.”) But the UFO museum more closely resembled a fifth grade science fair, where children swarmed around construction paper and rubber-cemented altars of newspaper and internet clippings. Dads in Earnhardt jackets and Elvis shirts assured their progeny that hundreds of people have indeed been abducted and enlightened/tortured by aliens. There are wonderful pockets of belief in the minds of children, which allow for such things to exist long after the chimney comes up empty. I too went in hopes of being abducted by an American fantasy, of being captivated by a definitive time of widespread confusion and animation in a conservative cowtown.

But walking the dusty New Mexican streets I came to see Roswell as yet another world’s largest ball of string, earwax candle, or five-legged gopher. The novelty attractions that don’t combine in all their strangeness to the allure of a second-tier European monument, or Incan rock-ruin, in my opinion. Then again, there are millions of educated, interesting people from every continent on earth that would choose, above anywhere else to visit in the entire United States, Las Vegas Nevada. Whether or not it makes me squirm, it is the cheap-crap-make-a-huge-deal-about-nothing novelty factor that drags millions across the interstates every year, despite gas prices climbing toward the four. It goes without saying that the “Winnebago days” of jumping in a family-sized home-on-wheels to tour the nation these days is about as financially sound as investing in a private gulf-stream. (For those of you considering, the nearest strip to Mt. Rushmore is in Rapid City.)

But it shouldn’t be about that, should it? Shouldn’t our top engineers be working to invent fuel efficient, solar-powered mobile homes? Lord knows the desert sun is enough to kill everything but cacti and rattlesnakes. The great road trip is Kerouac’s American legacy, Guevara’s tire treads, and the poor man’s key to a sense of what lies on the other side of the mountain. Without the capacity to “roam” the endless roads that span our country, are we truly free as Americans? Or trapped in our own financial gopher holes, digging for China?

Knock Knock

there was a time (dark)
when the words refused to come.
like disobedient dogs, they milled
about the house, begging for prime rib
and pissing at the carpet.
i could never leash you, i said.
it is against your religion.
and i would occupy the writing chair,
but writing would not occupy me.
instead i had to listen to the sound of birds
not hitting the windows
and tongue-inspired waves
lapping at the plastic walls of dishes,
empty pockets full of fingers.

words to wake to

you are most yourself this morning
with your hair leaning east for kansas city
right before you touch it
and become everyone else again
they are all contained in the television,
ads for booze, the flaming circus tent sex,
they cannot touch you in that moment
not like i can.

dont worry, it's me

our immeasurable potential is a flock
of fat blackbirds, frowning a telephone wire
with the weight of caked feathers, second-hand silk
as a hundred thousand voices stream through
thick wound cable, sagging, patient
voices saying i am sick
i love you so much, i am vulnerable
perhaps tomorrow buenos dias
look for me i will be there,
sedated hums and toe tickles as
the current hurries through the body of dark veins,
threatening to ground itself with the weight
of each new bird, until the first tail feathers touch
down, sending out the detonated migration
like a flung pack of cards, spades like rain
hearts in a low flying cloud

Chimes

for every day that he was gone
she built another, fashioning them
from hollowed tin cans, flat rocks and shells
brought back from the lake in velvet bags
empty bottles beads and bells and pipe
and when the supplies ran thin
she took to the cupboards, he was away
still
so forks and plates and tiles
were strung up to knock against each other
in the loudening wind, the noise was
gathering around the small house, almost as if
he were there, ricocheting off every part of it,
each bare wall and her tongue-wet lip
waited until the entire house was
bickering in constant chatter with the breeze
and commotion replaced all previous normality
so that it gradually became quiet once more
and she would wonder if ever
this wall of sound sent out across the country
from her porch would reach those absent ears
and would he know it when it hit him, and if
he did in fact trace it all the way back
would she hear another word of his
and moreover would it matter in the middle
of that magnificent hush

Tuna and Rye, Thoughts On A Brief Lunch Break

San Francisco looks as though she weighs fifty pounds
this afternoon, as if i could reach two fingers under a crack
in the pavement, and lift the street right up with a single hand
to see the hidden face, flesh beneath the underside,
the batteries and organs like a clock, a spitting engine,
rubber bands and reflective pools of grease—
ruins and splinters of wagon wheels strewn about, as if the
skyscrapers landed intact on the settlers, too busy plotting
squares of slanted land to notice them falling from above—
or perhaps they were lowered gently by cranes, tethered
by hair and dental floss, every available rope on hand...